Here’s what they found. In the brains of the students who received negative feedback the sympathetic nervous system lit up. This is the “fight or flight” system, the system that mutes the other parts of the brain and thus allows us to focus only on the information most necessary to survive. When this part of the nervous system is triggered, your heart rate goes up, endorphins flood your body, your cortisol levels rise, and you tense for action. This is your brain on negative feedback: it responds as if to a threat, and it narrows its activity. The strong negative emotions produced by criticism “inhibits access to existing neural circuits and invokes cognitive, emotional, and perceptual impairment,” psychology and business professor Richard Boyatzis said in summarizing the researchers findings.

Negative feedback doesn’t enable learning. It systematically inhibits it and is, neurologically speaking, how to create impairment.

In the students who received attention focused on their dreams and how they might go about achieving them, however, the sympathetic nervous system was not activated. Instead it was the parasympathetic nervous system that lit up. This is sometimes referred to as the “rest and digest” system. To quote the researchers again: “[T]he Parasympathetic Nervous System . . . stimulates adult neurogenesis (i.e., growth of new neurons) . . . , a sense of well being, better immune system functioning, and cognitive, emotional, and perceptual openness.”

In other words, positive, future-focused attention gives your brain access to more regions of itself and thus sets you up for greater learning. We’re often told that the key to learning is to get out of our comfort zones, but this finding gives the lie to that particular chestnut—take us out of our comfort zones and our brains stop paying attention to anything other than surviving the experience. It’s clear that we learn most in our comfort zone, because that’s our strengths zone, where our neural pathways are most concentrated. It’s where we’re most open to possibility, and it’s where we are most creative and insightful.

Tarrant paints a vivid picture of how challenging this can be. In one of my favorite

passages, he puts it like this:

If you are used to living in a small room and suddenly discover a wide meadow, you might feel unsafe. Everyone thinks that they want happiness, but they might not. They might rather keep their stories about who they are and about what is impossible. Happiness is not an add-on to what you already are; it requires you to become a different person from the one who set off seeking it.

Stafford Beer’s cybernetics tells us that in these cases, while people’s opinions are important, the facts of the organisational outcomes are what we need to work with. In his most pithy formulation of the principle, he expands the black box principle to a rather more uncomfortable statement.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

You can’t say how much information a human being is taking in and reacting to at any given time, but you can easily observe the difference between a human being that is coping and one that is overloaded. That’s my diagnosis of what led to the series of connected political eruptions between the financial crisis and the pandemic. The hypothesis set out as early as 1970 by Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock turned out to be correct: the number of people who were no longer able to cope with the modern world reached a critical mass.

If every maximising system has to have a higher-level system governing it (to make sure it doesn’t go bonkers), then that logically implies that the top level of any decision-making system that’s meant to operate autonomously can’t be a maximiser. And so, the governing philosophy of the overall economic system can’t be based on the constrained optimisation methodology that’s currently dominant in the subject of economics. Otherwise there’s a risk that the system will go bonkers, and that it will start pushing maximising objectives, oblivious to the danger that it’s on course for making human life impossible. Like it actually has done.